Welcome to the class blog of Ben Villarreal's Freshman English 12 Course: Visual and Verbal Literacies! Here you'll find the thoughts, ideas, and burgeoning written work from our class about the multiple literacies we experience.

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13 February 2012

Chapter 7 Art and Comics

In chapter seven, we learn that comics can indeed be art. McCloud gives us an example in the beginning of the chapter dealing with cavemen and how they represent art. The example was on page 166 with the woman making lines in the dirt with her stick. She is making art because "art is the way we assert our identities as individuals and break out of the narrow roles nature casts us in." Later on in the chapter, the six steps are revealed. The steps include 1. idea/purpose 2. form 3. idiom 4. structure 5. craft 6. surface. All of these steps are important when associating art with comics. When explaining the six steps, McCloud gave examples of aspiring comic writers who would create comics, yet professional critics would not like their drawings or stories because they did not have enough perspective or vanishing points. But at the end of the examples, it is explained that you don't always have to be perfect and that art is art and as long as your goal is achieved it will be OK. The end of the chapter concludes with realizing that as long as you have the six steps, it can be put in any order because they will always fall into place.

This chapter was short and too the point. I disagreed with McCloud in the beginning of the chapter only because different people view art differently. I don't agree that cavemen are art. Sure they can carve things that may become art, but humans are not art in itself. The six steps was broken down easily so that it was understandable. The most important of the six steps to me was structure because it's so close to the core, which means it has to be perfect so that the core doesn't get messed up.